


i'll love you in the springtime

by eurydicees



Category: Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types
Genre: Bisexual Suoh Tamaki, Canon Compliant, Character Study, College, Friends to Lovers, Gay Ootori Kyouya, Loneliness, Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, Post-Canon, T rating is for swearing, it's missing your friends hours boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28456965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydicees/pseuds/eurydicees
Summary: Kyoya goes to university in America, and he doesn't regret it. He doesn't.But fuck, he's lonely, and he wants to see Tamaki again.
Relationships: Ootori Kyouya/Suoh Tamaki
Comments: 10
Kudos: 95





	i'll love you in the springtime

It comes as a strange epiphany, one that he hadn’t been expecting. But here he is anyways, sitting in a busy Starbucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Kyoya is lonely. He doesn’t regret coming to America for university, and he enjoys his program, but it still feels like something is missing. It still feels like he’s lost something that he thought was permanent. He misses, Kyoya realizes, his friends. 

He always knew, to some degree, that he needed them. He always knew that he loved them. But he didn’t think that missing someone would look like this. He didn’t think that it would come as this craving, this longing. 

When he was with them, Kyoya doesn’t think that he appreciated them enough. He didn’t love them enough, or show it often enough. He didn’t ever say it out loud, he knows, and he never really implied it in a smile. He wonders now, while he sits without them, if they even knew how much they mean to him. If they know.

He knows that Tamaki understood, even if Kyoya never said it. He knows that Tamaki understood him in a way that no one ever will again. But he wonders, still, if the rest of them understood— Kyoya might be closest to Tamaki, but he still loves the rest of them. Isn’t that a weird feeling, he muses, to accept that he loves his friends only after moving an ocean away? To want to tell them he loves them, only after he’s lost them?

Hindsight, Kyoya decides, is a bitch. 

Now, unable to say anything, he sits in the Starbucks alone, listening to foreign names and complicated drink orders, and thinks about his friends. He wonders if they still think about him, and if they do so in present tense. He wonders if, with his absence, he’s become a memory rather than a friend. He wonders who he’ll become in the future, now that they’re not with him. He wonders who they’ll become, without him in their way. 

The absence of a person is a strange thing. It’s strange to think about how badly you miss someone that you don’t know anymore. Kyoya has only been gone for a month— his first year at university has barely begun— but it still feels like everything between him and his friends has changed. 

When Honey and Mori graduated and went to university, they were still within a reasonable travelling distance; they could come back when they had free time and were missing their friends. For all intents and purposes, all of the hosts were together in the same place. 

With Kyoya, it’s different. He’s an ocean away. He barely left a thought or a shadow behind him in Japan. He had packed all of his things in two suitcases and left the country behind with only the smallest goodbye. He didn’t want to make a scene out of it. 

Leaving, for him, wasn’t hard. It’s staying that’s the hard part. It’s not going back that’s hard. 

He doesn’t know what it is about sitting in Starbucks, listening to the elevator music they have on repeat hovering just under the mindless chatter of the students walking by, that’s making him miss his friends. But whatever it is— the noise, the smell of coffee beans, the sun coming through the glass windows— it’s keeping him from concentrating. 

He’s supposed to be working on a report for his econ class, working out numbers and statistics and predictions. He knows that material perfectly well, he knows exactly what he needs to be doing, but his eyes won’t focus on the screen. 

Instead, he’s thinking about his friends. They’re like ghosts, sitting in the café, clambering for table space and spilling coffee all over each other accidentally. Hikaru and Kaoru should never be given too much caffeine at one time, and Tamaki would love the idea of a coffee shop chain. Haruhi, if she were here with them, would be complaining about their antics, but she’d be laughing, too. She loves them, even as she protests. Honey would buy one of the overpriced cookies or cheesecakes, and Mori would sit with them and drink coffee with so much milk that it’s barely even coffee anymore. They would talk and laugh about nothing, about things that Kyoya would say are a waste of time. 

But now that he’s sitting here alone, he doesn’t think that those moments are so much a waste of time as they are just youthfulness. He’s supposed to be in the greatest four years of his life, in university and learning and meeting new people, but instead, he’s aching to go back to a time when he was having careless fun. Kyoya doesn’t think he’s been careless since the moment he stepped on the plane away from Japan. 

It’s something about Tamaki, he knows. Something about Tamaki makes him let go of everything. He thought that he hated it, thought that he thought it was annoying, but now he misses it. He longs to just be with him. He longs to touch, to hold, to whisper, to have, to kiss, to love. 

Kyoya swallows down the memories, trying not to linger on the ghost of Hikaru’s laugh and Haruhi’s smile, trying to push away all of his distractions. But they stick with him. 

He doesn’t know if these memories stick with the others in the same way that they stick with him; he doesn’t know if the others miss him like he does them. Until this moment, Kyoya didn’t think he missed them that much at all. Until this moment, Kyoya had been doing fine. Tired, but fine. 

His roommate had moved out and into a frat house after the first week, leaving Kyoya alone with no one to talk to. He doesn’t mind that, Kyoya is someone who flourishes in silence. But it also means that he doesn’t talk with anyone outside of his classes, and even in class, he barely talks. 

After three years of the Host Club, he thought that he had gotten enough socialization to last him three lifetimes. But he’s sitting alone in a Starbucks and he’ll be going home to an empty dorm room and he’s thinking about all of his ghosts and he’s _lonely._

He also doesn’t know how to fix it. He could call Tamaki; Tamaki is always happy to hear from him. He thinks about reaching into his jacket pocket and taking out his phone. It would be so easy. He has Tamaki’s phone number memorized. But still, something holds him back. He doesn’t know what it is, whether it’s some self-destructive tendency or just anxiety, but he can’t bring himself to pull out his phone. 

So instead of calling, Kyoya just takes a deep breath and stares at his computer screen, and refuses to think too hard about anything other than the stock market. 

When he finally quits his browser and starts to head back to his dorm, he hears someone laugh, and his head shoots straight up, thinking— but then he glances around the Starbucks, and there’s no one there he recognizes. He had thought, for half a second, that he had heard Tamaki laughing. 

But Tamaki isn’t there, because Tamaki is back in Japan. He’s at his own university, doing his own program. Kyoya doesn’t know how it’s going, doesn’t know if Tamaki has made other friends, if he’s found a new family to love. He must have— Tamaki has always made friends so easily. 

There are so many things that Kyoya can ask about, if he’s going to call. But he doesn’t. He walks back to his dorm, refusing to think about Tamaki. Refusing to think about all of the feelings that had grown up and out and taken over in their final two years at Ouran. Refusing to think about all of the wanting that Kyoya had done when the two of them were together. Refusing to think about his smile. 

He doesn’t want to think about any of the other hosts, either. They’re busy with their own lives, and he’s busy with his life, and that’s all that there is to it. 

At the same time, though, Kyoya isn’t really busy with his own life. He’s thrown himself into his work: he puts every ounce of energy that he has into every report and essay and test. He doesn’t have any of himself left over for things like friendship. Besides, there’s no one he wants to be friends with. 

He’s friend _ly_ with plenty of people, but he doesn’t have anyone close like he did at Ouran. He smiles at people during his classes, and he laughs when the rest of the class does, and he does his part during group projects. But he doesn’t have friends— he doesn’t have people who _know_ him. 

When he was fourteen, Kyoya met Tamaki, and Tamaki broke through every guard that he had up. Tamaki broke through everything and found the dirt beneath, and dared to love him anyways.

Now that he’s alone in a foreign country, Kyoya has pulled up all of his fences and concrete walls again. He’s not going to let anyone in, not in the same way that Tamaki had made his way in. He covers himself in a fake smile and a snap of a voice, turning himself into the perfect person he always tried to be. The one that gets him smiles and waves, but not the one that gets him friends. 

It’s fucking lonely, and Kyoya is tired. 

Back at his dorm room, Kyoya dumps his bag by the door, collapsing onto his bed. The room is a mess— he usually keeps things as tidy as he can, but he can’t bring himself to do it anymore. He can’t bring himself to fold clothes or close his textbooks or shut the closet door or turn the light off when he sleeps. 

Kyoya isn’t stupid. He knows that he’s spiraling, he knows the signs of depression. He knows that he should be working harder to fix these habits, to take care of himself. He knows that, if he lets this continue, he’ll only get worse. 

But still, he doesn’t know how to change, how to stop it. He doesn’t know how to become what he was. He doesn’t know what choices made him smile like he had while with the Host Club. He doesn’t know which roads he went down that brought him to Tamaki, or which ones would bring him back. 

But there’s no point in wondering about the past, because there’s nothing that he can do about it. Kyoya is in America, an ocean away, and there’s nothing to do but be here. There’s no point in thinking about the _might have been_ or the _could have done._ He made his choice. 

He doesn’t regret it. 

He’s lonely. 

Those two thoughts are ones that can coexist, Kyoya decides. He can be satisfied with his choices but still be lonely. Being happy or unhappy doesn’t matter— he’s getting a great education, and he’s studying hard, and he’s doing the best thing he can do for his future. He’s satisfied with that, and his father is, too. He can also be alone here, and miss the people that he had at Ouran. He can miss the feeling of being at home in a group. 

There’s no fixing this kind of loneliness, he knows. Not without finding all of his friends again. There’s no fixing this kind of sadness without them all being together, and that’s not an option. 

He falls asleep that night in his clothes, shoes still on, lying face down on the bed. When he wakes up, he can’t remember his dreams, but there are tears drying on his pillow. 

Kyoya goes to class early, like he does every day. He drinks his coffee slowly, savouring it, checking his texts while he sits in the back of the slowly filling classroom. Tamaki texted twice. Haruhi did, too. They’re worried about him. He doesn’t answer, just puts his phone away until class starts. 

As much as he wants to talk to them, he can’t bring himself to do it. Talking to them means admitting that he misses them, means admitting that everything isn’t perfect here. It means admitting that, at some point, things went wrong and Kyoya couldn’t handle it. Talking to them means admitting how badly he wants to be back with them. 

He wonders, briefly, if they want him back, too. He wonders, briefly, if they miss him just as much. 

Then he decides that it doesn’t matter, because he’s not there. He’s not going back. Everything that was left there for him— his friends— is also scattered. Tamaki, also away at university, is far enough from home that he can’t travel back just because Kyoya is lonely. Even if Kyoya were to return home, Tamaki wouldn’t be waiting for him there, and isn’t that what he really wants? 

The lecture begins, and Kyoya listens only to his professor, and not the voice in his head egging him towards his phone. He can’t deal with that voice right now; he can’t deal with this loneliness. For that hour and a half that he’s in class, all that matters is averages and outliers and his professor’s monotone voice. All that matters is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Japan is a fucking ocean away. 

Kyoya leaves the lecture feeling a little less empty than when he entered. He waves to the professor on his way out, and says his goodbyes to a few other students, and then he makes his way back to his dorm. There’s nowhere better to go, and no one else to see. This is his daily routine, this is what he always does. Wake up, get coffee, go to class, sit in his room, go to class, get lunch, sit in his room, get dinner, sit in his room, sleep, repeat. 

It’s not healthy, and he knows it. 

But he also doesn’t know how to stop. It’s a vicious cycle, and he’s unable to break out of it. It’s either impossible, or he just doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have the energy, and it’s not worth the effort. He could break out of the cycle and go where? It’s not like he has friends to fall back on anymore. They’re gone. He hasn’t heard from any of the hosts other than Tamaki and Haruhi in a week or so, by now. 

Getting back to his room, he checks his phone again. Despite radio silence from the others, Tamaki has texted for a third time that morning, asking if he’s okay. _How’s America? Are you sleeping enough? I’m exhausted, classes are hard, but I’m enjoying it. How’s the weather over there?_

Kyoya doesn’t answer any of the messages. He doesn’t have answers for Tamaki. Eventually, he guesses, Tamaki will stop texting, and Kyoya will be alone for real. He’ll be in America, with no ties left to Japan, with no home to return to. The members of the Host Club are scattered, and Kyoya half feels like that means he himself is scattered, split into six pieces. 

It takes until the spring of his first year at Harvard for Tamaki to stop texting. It takes until spring for Tamaki to give up. 

Kyoya didn’t think that it would hurt as much as it does. He had been answering messages on occasion, just to let Tamaki know that he’s alive. He had been picking up when Tamaki called at night, and they would talk until he could see the sun coming up and he was so exhausted that he would miss class the next day. But he was pulling away, and both him and Tamaki could see it. 

It’s April, and Tamaki doesn’t text anymore. 

It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt. 

Kyoya sits in that Starbucks where he first realized that he’s lonely, and he looks out of the window, watching people walk through campus, and he’s so far from home that it’s beginning to ache. It’s beginning to eat at his bones like an unnamed and unexplainable parasite of homesickness. It’s beginning to haunt him. Japan is a ghost. It’s been a week and a day since he last talked to Tamaki; and while that doesn’t sound like a long time, it’s a long time for Tamaki. They used to talk every day, and Tamaki would text multiple times and call at least once. But it’s April, and Tamaki doesn’t call. 

The music in the Starbucks changes to some classical song on the piano, and Kyoya recognizes it only because it’s one of Tamaki’s favorite pieces. He recognizes it only because he’s heard Tamaki play it a thousand times before, and what would be a thousand more, but a fucking dream? 

He’s listening to the piano, and staring out of the window, hand burning as it wraps around a cup of coffee, and then he’s crying, and he doesn’t know how to stop. He’s just this international student during finals week crying in a Starbucks and wishing that he were home. He’s trying to remember what Hikaru’s laugh sounded like, or what Honey’s smile looked like, and he can’t remember. He can’t recall any of it. 

He swallows down his tears and the burning at his palms, searching through all of the empty spaces in his head— there are so many absences that held memories long since disappeared. He misses them, misses remembering. He doesn’t know at what point he forgot— it’s barely been a year, but everything is already decaying, both memory and friendship. 

When the song ends, Kyoya lets the tears dry on his cheeks, shoulders his bag, and walks back to his dorm. Sleep, class, dorm, class, food, sleep, rinse and repeat. There’s nothing else for him to do. Nothing else for him to be. 

There was a time, he thinks, when he thought that he could be more. He thought that, just maybe, he could be more than an Ootori son. He could be more than everyone wanted him to be. He could laugh, maybe. He could smile at stupid things, he could play childish games even if he pretended to hate them. He could sit with Haruhi and drink tea and make fun of the others. He could roll his eyes at Hikaru and Kaoru for whatever nonsense they were up to, laughing internally. He could eat cake with Honey and watch the cherry blossoms with Mori. He could sit with Tamaki and ache with wanting, and he could hide his crush like every other ridiculous girl at Ouran. 

There was a time when he thought that maybe he could be something akin to a teenager. 

Now, walking back to his dorm, he thinks he’s lost that chance. He let every friendship he had slip through his fingers, and now he doesn’t know where to start with making new ones. He doesn’t know if he wants to make new ones— he had tried so hard the first time, and it didn’t work because nothing lasts forever. Who is he to try again and again, and lose every time?

It’s April, and it’s been months since Kyoya has heard from most of the hosts. It’s April, and Tamaki hasn’t called him in a week and one day, and it _hurts._

He takes the long way back to his dorm, trying to compose himself. He hasn’t cried in years. People like to say that crying is a good release, that it helps get the emotions out, but Kyoya hasn’t found that to be true. For him, crying is just exhausting. It makes it hard to see, and his glasses get uncomfortable, and his stomach tightens up, and his nose starts to run, and it’s embarrassing. 

Getting back to his dorm is painful. It takes what feels like a thousand years. Every thought that he’s ever banished from his head in recent months comes back to him now. How lonely he is. How much he misses his friends. How much he misses Japan. How much he hates political science. How he wants a clean room without having to clean it. How he wants to scream, sometimes, and how he wants to just collapse and let someone hold him. How he wants to sleep and wake up rested. 

The walk up the stairs is long. He’s so tired, and his bag is so heavy. The loneliness is a physical weight, pulling his shoulders down. How could he ever have been as naive as to think that he is stronger than gravity? 

Then he turns down the hallway and towards his room, and he hears Tamaki. He hears a laugh. He hears his name. He’s hearing things that aren’t there, he’s sure of it, and he’s hating his head for doing this when he looks up from the floor and towards his room, and Tamaki is standing there. 

He’s smiling with bright eyes and his arms are out, and Kyoya doesn’t stop to think, doesn’t stop to double guess himself, no, he drops his bag and keys and he runs. He rushes into Tamaki’s hug, nearly knocking him over, grabbing onto him as best as he can, and he’s crying for the second time that day, his head buried in Tamaki’s shoulders, arms thrown around his neck. 

Tamaki stumbles back, then gathers his balance, laughing, and wraps his arms around Kyoya’s waist, hands reaching up to his shoulder blades. He pulls Kyoya close, his own smile buried against Kyoya’s shoulder. 

“Missed me much?” Tamaki asks, and his voice is a _song._

Kyoya pulls away reluctantly, his eyes still wet. Tamaki is _there,_ and Kyoya hasn’t been forgotten. Suddenly Tamaki is holding up half of the loneliness that Kyoya had been feeling, and the sky doesn’t seem so heavy anymore. 

“Yeah,” Kyoya breathes. “I missed you.” 

Tamaki smiles at that. “I missed you too, Kyoya.” 

They stare at each other for a heartbeat, and then Kyoya, as desperate and lonely and weak as he is, takes another look at him, and gives up. He kisses Tamaki. 

They’re both frozen for a moment, and Kyoya is still crying, so if Tamaki hates him after this, at least the tears are already there. Kyoya is sure that he’s ruined things and he’s about to bolt out of there, and then Tamaki starts kissing back. 

When Tamaki pushes Kyoya away, gently, ever so gently, he’s breathless. “I didn’t realize you missed me _that_ much.” 

“Sorry,” Kyoya says, swallowing. He takes a step back, realizing that Tamaki’s hands are still on his waist. 

Then Tamaki pulls him in again, hands never leaving Kyoya, eyes still holding a brilliance that says more than he knows how to. “Don’t be sorry. If I had known, I would have come months ago.” 

“You should have,” Kyoya says. He’s not quite sure what’s happening; he had just kissed Tamaki and Tamaki doesn’t seem to mind at all. “I— fuck, I missed you so much.” 

“You too,” Tamaki murmurs. He leans in closer, kissing Kyoya on each cheek, and then on the lips. “I’m here now.” 

Kyoya closes his eyes, leaning forwards, their foreheads resting against each other. He can feel Tamaki’s breath on his cheek, a slight tickle of air. It hasn’t really sunk in yet, not really, no, but Tamaki is _here._

“Hey!” someone calls out, and Kyoya knows that voice. “Are you two done now? Can the rest of us get a hug already?” 

Kyoya pulls away from Tamaki, and oh— they’re all here, all six of his stupidly lovable, kind, beautiful, hopeful friends. Just seeing them, Kyoya feels himself coming back to life. They’re here, smiling, arms out, and he forgets what the word loneliness even means.


End file.
